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If you wish to shoot at a king, do not wound him

It’s time for Egyptians to storm Mubarak’s mansion. It’s him, or them and he’s made it clear that he’d rather it was them. And if the protests fail, a lot of them, including the women, are going to spend a lot of time being tortured.

It would certainly help if our curiously passive president would occasionally utter something in favor of the democracy and freedom he claims to champion, perhaps by backing the protesters, saying they have justified grievances. Ah, but if he were to say that, then it would inexorably lead to the sickening nexus of corruption in torture in Egypt, a culture aided and abetted for decades by the US with money, guns, and CIA manuals on how to torture. He can’t back the protesters because their trail of grievances leads directly to Washington D.C.

The protests are spreading. Jordan and Yemen are feeling the quake. Iran and China are censoring Middle East news in their countries. Tyrants everywhere, it seems, are getting twitchy. It’s that damned internet. People can get news from everywhere now. This makes propagandizing a citizenry just so much more difficult. What is a dictator to do?

It may end in a blood bath in Egypt. But even if it does, a match has been struck for freedom and it’s not going out.

If you win you’re a founding father, if you lose you’re a corpse — Saul Alinksy on revolution.